


A Temporal Body Problem

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Bickering, F/F, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, explicit consensual sex, ino is vain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:14:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21664288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Ino and Sakura live in the closest approximation of domestic bliss that two active duty ninja can really manage. They do not intend to have any dramatic adventures.Accidents happen, though.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Yamanaka Ino
Comments: 95
Kudos: 556





	1. I'm pretty sure I read an Icha Icha novel that started like this one time

Ino was damp, exhausted and stinking by the time she returned home.

Her hair was an entirely _different colour_ , dyed with swamp water, and her clothes reeked of a thrilling mix of contaminants.

Hinata descended from her post at the village gates to sign off on her papers. She was polite enough not to mention that Ino’s supplies – including her scentless antiperspirant and soap – had clearly gone missing sometime during the last week. She couldn't have avoided noticing, though. Ino shifted on her heels uncomfortably. She knew she smelled bad.

The veins around Hinata's eyes plumped grotesquely with blood for a moment. Ino went very still at that, and her heart beat a little faster. Even though she knew Hinata was no kind of threat to her, she couldn't help but feel pinned, trapped beneath her strange gaze.

If her obvious tension bothered Hinata, she did not make it obvious -- and her body language always seemed a little anxious, so it was hard to tell anyway. 

After a short but interminable pause, Hinata determined to her satisfaction that Ino really was Ino. She bowed briefly and let her in through the gates. 

"Welcome home," she said quietly.

"Thank you," Ino said. She waved tiredly as she came through. 

Konoha in spring was as pretty as a picture. The village was full of trees, and they were all bright with new growth – even the evergreens were beginning to throw off the duller shades of winter. There were tiny buds on the fruit trees, too, and soon they’d come out and fill the air – and, for completeness’s sake, the streets, the yards, the gutters, and the hair of innocent bystanders – with an explosion of pretty pink petals.

It marginally improved Ino’s mood as she stomped to the tower.

_Marginally._

For once, Kakashi was actually sitting at his desk, wearing… most… of his uniform. The hat was leaning up against one leg of his desk, doing double-duty as a basket for storing several books of the Icha-Icha series.

Ino wrinkled her nose to see it. The books were collector’s items now that Jiraiya was dead, but that didn’t improve the writing. It was hard to read one of those books without getting the distinct impression that the male characters were meant to be normal, relatable people and the female characters were meant to be blow up dolls. Even the gay ones. Sometimes… especially the gay ones.

When she came to the desk, Kakashi wrinkled his nose right back at her. “Ah… you lost your supplies.”

He leaned back a little, away from her.

One of Ino’s eyebrows ticked. She guessed you couldn’t count on everyone to be as polite as Hinata.

“Yes, Hokage-sama?”

There was a pause.

He sniffed again. Under his mask, his face shifted into an expression she couldn’t read, but which she could guess at. “You know… you don’t have to report in _right away_...”

"Oh," said Ino sweetly, determined to share her suffering, "but it's policy." Without invitation, she dumped her ill-gotten goods onto his desk – a sack of indifferently clean scrolls and scraps of paper – seals, intel, random letter writing, a few shopping lists, someone’s journal entries.

“The daimyou’s family and servants send their regards,” she said, tossing her long, filthy hair over one shoulder. It left a smudge on her skin. “Although their house ninja caught on after a week or so and chased me out.” 

And they hadn’t given up until she’d taken a header over a cliff. She’d been lucky – although her fractured finger buddy-wrapped to its neighbour sure didn’t think so – that there’d been rough, moving water at the end of the drop and not, say, rocks. Water nature chakra, Ino knew what to do with. Earth wasn’t her strength.

She could still keenly feel the dirty water engulfing her, sharply cold, sudden and terrifying. It rushed over her when she closed her eyes. But she had been lucky. It was a qualified success: intel received, no casualties. They knew she’d been there, which wasn’t ideal, but they wouldn’t know what she’d learnt – or what she’d been looking for. Even she didn’t know that.

“A...aa,” said Kakashi, eyeing the sack on his desk. It smelled bad, too. Some of it had gotten wet, but there were waterproofing seals on it. The paper would be readable. Smelly, but readable.

Kakashi gave her his least sincere smile, the one that turned his right eye into a little crescent of fake cheer. “Good work! ...Now please take them home and take a shower,” he added, a lot more sincerely. “You can catalogue them and bring them in with your report.”

* * *

Ino made quick work of the walk through the village. Despite the pretty scenery and the bloom of fruit trees doing their brief, wild thing and budding with intentions to scatter petals everywhere, she felt too weary and dirty to enjoy it -- and she didn't like the idea of running into anyone while she looked like such a mess, either. 

She took to the rooftops, wearily, and then breathed a deep sigh when she finally made it home to their tiny, single-storey house in the west end of the village. The garden needed a little work and the mailbox was full. She ignored both, unlocked their wooden door and flared her chakra for the genjutsu trap behind it. Her keys clattered loudly on the pale wooden table in the corner, and the sack of mixed documentation and scrolls followed.

Their house seemed very clean and tidy -- despite, not because of, Sakura's domestic skills, and even though Ino hadn't been home for weeks. She felt absolutely disgusting by comparison. Even the pale walls seemed to be mocking her.

Ino glanced down at her bare feet and realised that, despite leaving her shoes at the door, she was leaving footprints. 

"Shower," she muttered. In the clean, normal context of her home the mission grime felt so much worse. Shower, shower, shower.

The shower was almost a religious experience on its own.

Ino peeled herself out of her mission gear and discarded it in a heap. The torn puttees were a write off, her trousers needed patching -- the flak jacket was probably the only usable part of her uniform, and it reeked of old sweat, rust and stale water. The water pressure was high and the temperature was hot. The steaming stream of it drummed against her like a hard, steady massage. Slowly, she relaxed.

Taking care of herself was meditative. Ino took her time, lathered up every inch of herself, shaved, washed the dirty water and grease from her hair.

She combed out her hair under the spray once the worst of the grime was out, and then she lathered it up, too, so the whole bathroom began to smell of expensive floral shampoo instead of gross mission detritus. Alright, she thought, triumphant, when she climbed back out and wiped down the foggy mirror and looked at herself. There was evidence of the long work on her face: soft bruise-dark skin beneath her eyes, and maybe a few days of hard running and low food and a bit of dehydration had taken some of the cutest roundness from her cheeks. But she was clean, and she smelled good, and her hair was spilling like silk down her back again.

By the time Sakura got home, she'd have thrown her clothes out or into the washing machine, and she'd be soft and pretty and... maybe a little concealer wouldn't hurt anything...

The point was that Sakura was going to come home to her beautiful, stunningly sexy woman, and she was going to _admire_ how beautiful and stunningly sexy she was, and then naturally she was going to want to put her hands all over Ino, who would magnanimously allow her to.

And... Ino was just going to pretend she always just mysteriously returned from gross intel missions smelling like lavender and with the soft sheen of expensive moisturiser on her skin, and --

"Ino," came Sakura's voice from down the hall, "what the hell is all this on the table? It smells like --" there was a pause, "-- Naruto's socks."

Of course Sakura could still ruin this plan by coming home early. 

"I'm taking care of it," Ino yelled back, annoyed. "Hang on!"

She guessed expensive lotions might have to wait. Stupid Sakura, ruining her plans.

She threw on an old tee shirt and a long skirt, hung her towel over the hook on the door, scooped her clothes up from the bathroom floor and headed back out into the apartment.

Sakura was leaning the swell of one hip against the table where Ino had dumped the sack, leafing through the mail -- mostly advertising.

"Anything good?" Ino wondered.

Usually there wasn't, but sometimes they had grocery store coupons. 

Sakura made a noise and Ino looked over her shoulder.

"How to enjoy longer lasting and harder erections," she read aloud, resting her chin on Sakura's shoulder.

It wasn't that comfortable, objectively -- it was actually kind of bony. But Ino could smell the long day at the hospital on her, a harsh but familiar smell, and below that, notes of a hundred things that made up Sakura on her skin.

She inhaled for the same reason that her mission pack included one of Sakura's old tee-shirts, which they did not speak of.

She smiled. "Ne, Sakura... I didn't know you worried about how long -- _hhhhk_ ," she cut off, wheezing, when Sakura jabbed her in the ribs. With love. It was a loving jab.

Sakura's eye twitched. "That doesn't even make sense."

She tossed the paper unerringly into the recycling bin without looking, turning instead to see Ino.

"You're back," she added.

Of course, instead of Super Sexy Ino, Sakura was getting Weary Damp Post-Mission Ino, which had not really been the plan. 

"I'm back," Ino agreed, swaying into the warmth of her. She couldn't find the energy to feel very irritated with Sakura for being home early anyway.

The difference was lost on Sakura anyway. She peered at Ino's face, and then her neck, and then her eyes skimmed down over her body and for a second Ino thought she was checking her out -- she shifted her weight, straightened up under the look. She had great boobs, she knew it, and she knew Sakura liked them (who wouldn't?) so --

Obliviously, Sakura said, "Your hand's broken," and she scooped up Ino's hand with its teeny tiny fracture in one finger.

"Oh." Ino slumped. "Yeah, that did happen."

Sakura unwrapped the bandage deftly and then ran one green-glowing finger over the swollen finger. "You can use the mystical palm technique yourself, you know," she chided.

Her chakra control was good enough that it would have been silly not to take basic medial training, but Ino wasn't great at delicate bone work, as it happened. She could do it in a pinch, but once she'd been pretty sure she'd lost her pursuers, it hadn't been that urgent.

Sakura was a genius with medical jutsu. And Ino liked watching her casually execute them with extreme competence.

She barely felt the technique, just the sudden diminishing of a dull throb she'd gotten used to. "Nice work."

Since Sakura was too preoccupied to notice that Ino was very beautiful and had great boobs, Ino leaned in and kissed her jaw. Her skin was very soft under the sensitive surface of Ino's lips.

Sakura, who had been looking at Ino's bruised feet with a critical eye, stiffened at the gentle touch of her lips. 

Ino swayed closer and reached out to draw Sakura in with a hand around her waist -- it was less curved than Ino's, tight with hard, compact muscle, and it felt just right beneath her hand. She kissed Sakura's jaw again and hummed in pleasure at the texture, and the smell, and the gentle warmth of her skin. She lifted her mouth, smiled at how still Sakura had gone, and let her lips drag ever so gently over the hinge of her jaw.

Sakura shivered and let Ino pull her closer, tilting her head so that Ino could reach as much of her throat as possible. 

"Mmm," she said, soft and raw. It was a sweet, vulnerable tone that made Ino feel warm and shivery. "I missed you."

Sakura wrapped her own arms around Ino's waist and leaned into her.

"I'll bet," Ino agreed. "Who wouldn't miss me, when you could be coming home to this?"

"What, to a pile of stinky scrolls on my kitchen table?"

Ino bit her throat in playful retaliation. It wasn't hard: just a quick, wet scrape of teeth while she pulled her more tightly in. "I'm sorry," she said, and licked the spot she'd just bitten, startling her, "that you can't see my sublime beauty past your enormous, oversized, hideous forehead."

Sakura scoffed. And then she also trod pointedly on Ino's toe with one socked foot. But Ino noticed she didn't pull back. In fact, she breathed out a little harder and arched closer. 

Ino pulled back, finally, when Sakura's neck started to look like it was turning a little red. Sakura did not let her go far, surging against her and catching her mouth in a slow and unhurried kiss.

They parted for a breath. 

"I missed you, too," Ino admitted quietly against Sakura's mouth, watching her through heavy lidded eyes. 

Sakura smiled and kissed her again. Ino's whole body went hot when she sucked on her tongue.

She felt Sakura's fingers on her waist, and then her nails scraped and dragged gently down, over her hips, across the smooth firm rounded shape of her butt -- she smiled when her hand lingered there, apparently unable to continue on without giving a slow, deliberate squeeze.

Ino wriggled against the touch, arching showily into it, which had the dual benefit of pushing her breasts up into Sakura's body.

Sakura laughed at her, but she took the encouragement in the spirit Ino intended, and their kissing and slow deliberate groping grew rapidly, increasingly heated.

The next time they drew apart, neither was laughing, and both were breathing harder. 

"So, those scrolls," Sakura began, eyeing Ino and then eyeing the table. One of her hands was toying with the waistband of her skirt, fingers rubbing little circles into the skin of her hip beneath. Her other hand was on Ino's thighs, heavy and warm, and full of a carefully restrained strength that made Ino feel wild and shivery. 

"It's fine," Ino said, breathless and a little reckless, "I carried them back here in a _sack_ , there can't be anything that unstable in there--"

If there had been anything else she had to say about the scrolls, she forgot it completely because Sakura mumbled, "Okay," against her mouth and she -- bit, gently, at her lower lip, and slicked it with her tongue, and then she grabbed Ino by her thighs and dumped her on the table with exactly as much strain as she'd taken with the letters from their mailbox. Like Ino weighed nothing at all.

The skirt disappeared somewhere. Ino didn't miss it.

Sakura shoved Ino back, gently but inescapably, holding her steadily against the wood with the pressure of one rough little hand. Ino made another breathless noise and hooked one knee around her, and Sakura kissed down her neck, between her breasts -- she shoved her shirt up as far as it would go without coming off properly -- down her belly, over the sensitive skin low on its curve. Ino whined, grabbing at her hand.

"Hurry up," she demanded. "Put your mouth on me." Sakura snorted into her belly button, but then she _did_ , licking a long rough hot stripe right through the cotton cloth of her underpants.

"Sakura," Ino growled, hips hitching, but Sakura's hand on her hip was more than strong enough to hold her there.

Sakura laughed again, and tugged the cute little briefs with their lace and little bows down off her hips. Finally she buried her face between Ino's thighs and really applied herself with long, firm, lengthwise strokes of her tongue.

Ino's head thumped back onto the table. Her breath caught all soft and ragged in her chest and came out in a hard groan.

Her hips rolled and her body heaved, and she scraped at the polished wood of the table and howled, "yes, yes, Sakura, yes," until her thighs shook and she came so hard that spots danced before her eyes.

She knew she'd knocked the sack off the table with one thrashing foot, and in her glowing orgasmic haze she didn't care at all. But then something lit up. It was not just some beautiful afterglow hallucination.

Ino shot up into a sitting position. "What--"

"Ino, you said they were stable!" Sakura yelped.

A seal had bloomed beneath them, coming from one of the scrolls at the bottom of the spilled pile. "I thought they were!"

Both of them dove off the table, heedless of their state of dress or composure, and scrambled for it -- It lit up with a rush of crackling vermillion light and powerful chakra.

"Sakura!" shrieked Ino, watching the light enclose her. She didn't think, she lunged, and as a terrible vortex broke open below them Sakura's arms snapped closed like a vise around her.

Then everything was dark, rushing, a void of howling wind and chakra. For a terrible, panicked second Ino thought of the cliff from her mission, of the water closing over her head, trapping and rushing and suffocating.

But she could breathe here, in the dark. Nothing was solid except Sakura's warm, familiar-smelling body shoved against hers. But she could breathe.

"Sakura?" she yelled over the roaring.

"Hold on! Don't -- don't let go!"

There wasn't much chance of that. There was nobody in the world stronger than Sakura, and when she put her mind to holding onto something, it didn't go anywhere. Ino had never been more grateful to be the thing she was holding onto.

Ino's brain finally kicked back into mission gear. The scrolls. What had they been? She'd dug most of them out of the bunker, so they were -- mostly forbidden techniques, kept safe during the war. Was this an extremely unsettling genjutsu? She squashed her chakra right down for a heartbeat, felt Sakura's arms pull her even closer, and then flared her chakra again, hard. Nothing happened, and there didn't seem to be anything unfamiliar in her chakra system--

Out of nowhere, they hit the ground with a thump. The ground outside. "Ow," said Ino. She was mostly concerned with wriggling free of Sakura's octopus-limbs and straightening out her oversize tee-shirt, though.

Sakura let her, but she grabbed Ino's arm immediately after like she was worried they might be swallowed up by an unexpected hole in reality and separated.

Ino would have called that kind of overcautious about ten seconds ago. She gripped back.

"Not a genjutsu," Sakura said. "We're really outside."

"Was that -- some kind of hack flying thunder god technique?" Ino wondered, toeing the dirt with her bare foot. It looked like a forest near Konoha, at least, full of the towering evergreens that were colloquially known as Hashirama trees. The roots were thick and deep and the ground seemed more or less undisturbed, hard-packed -- so they'd been there for a long time, too.

"Maybe," said Sakura. "We'd be lucky if that was all it was." She breathed out. "I can't believe you got distracted like that next to a pile of volatile technique scrolls. That's so irresponsible."

"Excuse me," said Ino incredulously. "Who got distracted?"

"You said they were stable!"

"I said I _thought_ they were stable!"

"They were your responsibility," Sakura said mulishly.

"Are you serious?" muttered Ino. She rolled her eyes. "I'm not even wearing a bra. Can we argue about this later?" She wasn't even wearing _pants_. Worse, she didn't even have a knife, which inexplicably made her feel much more naked.

"I'm just _saying-_ "

"Forehead. _Later_."

Sakura sniffed.


	2. Next time you go time travelling, please pack some trousers

The natural next step was to learn more about their situation. Bootleg Flying Thunder God or not, there was no telling where they’d actually ended up.

The grass was green and the trees were towering and familiar. Birdsong and the soft hum of insects suggested late spring or early summer, and there was nothing but dense forest and undisturbed ground.

Ino looked up at the trees above. She could certainly hear the birds, which meant that she could also use her family’s technique to take over one of them and send it on a reconnaissance flight.

Climbing a tree in nothing but a tee shirt felt weird. The bark was rough on the soles of her feet, her boobs jostled unpredictably, and she was well aware that, despite their situation, Sakura was watching her with slightly more than professional interest as she climbed after her. 

She looked back at her, and Sakura glanced away, flushing. Ino rolled her eyes and kept climbing. 

The canopies smelled of sap and dirt and growing things. Upon inspection, there was cracked and chipped bark on the thicker branches that, quite unlike the ground below, suggested the area did see heavy traffic—a dead give-away that this place was in use among Konoha shinobi. 

“Definitely in Fire Country,” Sakura said, eyeing what was nearly a complete footprint left in the bark. “We might make it home before dark.”

The sun was still high up, easy to spot from the canopy here. Ino nodded. “Aa… Let’s hope.”

An insect crawled over her bare foot, making her twitch. She glanced down at it, decided it wasn’t a kikkai beetle, and then squashed it with her heel. Insects. Gross. 

Reconnaissance was Ino's job, obviously. Usually she took pride (maybe a little _too much_ pride, depending on who you asked) in her work. However, Ino did not enjoy the reconnaissance process today. 

Getting into a good spot was a nightmare. Even when she thought she'd found one, she squirmed on her tree branch, making the leaves rustle gently. She didn't want to startle the local birds, because she'd have need of them. But it was... uncomfortable.

"Would you stop that," hissed Sakura, so quiet it was barely a breath on the wind.

Ino scowled. She didn't usually indulge in indiscipline, but she didn't usually end up half naked in a tree either. There was an insect slowly making its way up her thigh, step by creeping prickling step, and while she wasn't truly that squeamish, she... wasn't sure where it might eventually end up. 

Sakura's thighs bracketed her on either side, because Sakura was wearing trousers beneath her short apron skirt. She did not have to worry about what might crawl up _her_ urethra. Ino leaned back against her, knees tucked demurely to one side of the branch. There were medical procedures she didn't want to contemplate dancing before her mind's eye.

"Shut up," she breathed back, and flicked Sakura's wrist where it was curled around her own waist. There was a squirrel a few branches away, which was useless to her, but beyond that -- a nest with a brooding bird. 

_Sorry, mama bird_ , she thought, and slid her fingers into position. As her chakra surged and her consciousness focused into a familiar, tight beam, zooming toward the little bird, she felt Sakura pinch her side. Rude. 

* * *

The nearest village was indeed Konoha. It wasn’t even that far away.

It was a relief. Nobody wanted to be stuck in the middle of the wilderness with no supplies, no weaponry and, critically, no pants. Even for two experienced adult ninja, that would have been a rough trip home…

The bird Ino had taken was some kind of predatory species with strange, movement-focused eyesight. Although it wasn’t easy to focus while flying, the structures of Konoha’s buildings were obvious. The vague blur of the faces in the mountainside, the bright colours of an advertisement for another Icha-Icha re-release, the familiar springs outside the bathhouse… 

Ino wasn’t a bird, personally. She could fly just fine, once she got the hang of a new host body. But landing was… tricky. Her ‘gentle’ landing on someone’s chimney became a clumsy tumble right off that chimney and onto the red roof tiles.

Once she was finally still, the world around her was only a little easier to see clearly, stark blurs of movement in an indistinguishable landscape merging into static details. 

The view was familiar but curiously unsettling. It was Konoha, that much was true—but it wasn’t Ino’s Konoha. The buildings weren’t the same, the stores on the main street were only mostly correct… She could pick out Ichiraku, a village institution, but not Anko’s favourite dango stand. She tilted her head, trying to get a proper look. What had happened here? 

She couldn’t see the high balconies of the apartments next to the tiny house she shared with Sakura, either. And when she gracelessly scrambled back into the air for a fly-over, she saw that her garden was a mess every bit as bad as it had been when she and Sakura had first gotten the place.

Ino squawked in outrage. _Really_. 

If this was a genjutsu, it certainly wasn’t a very good one… but both she and Sakura had already tested that theory. Unless it was a very odd, sharingan-constructed one, this was no illusion. Which left… what, exactly? 

Ino took off again to drift over some more familiar landmarks. 

The Academy hadn’t changed a bit from an aerial view, but it hadn’t changed in decades anyway. The Uchiha complex was singed, derelict and empty, which was depressing, but not very informative. 

The Hokage’s administrative tower… 

At the sight of a familiar tail of blond hair, Ino forgot what her wings were doing. She lost altitude abruptly and nearly brained herself on a weathervane while making an emergency landing. 

Inoichi was leaving the building. 

Her _dad_ was down there! Alive! A tangled mix of hope and anxiety and bitter resentment rose up and overwhelmed her. All her feathers fluffed up angrily.

And even aside from the very sight of him causing her stomach to clench and flop alarmingly and her body to shudder, her father looked _all wrong_. 

His face wasn’t as lined and his hair was longer, like it needed a cut. He was missing a scar on his chin, even, when she really focused the bird’s hunter’s eyes on his face. Ino hadn’t seen that red haori for years even before the war. Inoichi had stopped wearing it after field mission had seen it covered in contaminated blood. 

There was a blind second of instinct in which she almost launched herself off the roof to confront him. Her muscles tensed for it and her feathers rustled restlessly. Her heart throbbed, hot and uncomfortable within the cage of her hollow bones. 

But she was too well-trained. She sat quietly while the feeling burned, trembling a little, and when she could breathe again she shook her feathers out and took flight in the opposite direction. 

This time, she knew exactly what to look for. It _was_ a space-time jutsu. She was already convinced. 

Instead of just an aerial pass over the Academy, this time she descended when she was near enough. The building was the same: whitewashed, with red and orange roofing, set in a cleared grassy area that stood out starkly from the foliage of the Hashirama trees that grew throughout the village. It could have been pulled from any time in the last fifty years of Konoha's history, and it would have looked identical. 

This time, Ino almost stuck the landing on a tree branch. It smacked her in the chest unexpectedly—her legs were a weird length!— and she made a shocked _awk_! and tumbled to a lower branch. After a second of uncertain clinging to her new perch, she righted herself and re-settled her feathers. She was fine. It was fine.

From her branch, she had a view in through one of the ground floor windows, which was exactly what she’d been aiming for.

Even with her altered vision, twelve year old Sakura’s hair was a bright beacon among the academy students. Once she picked out Sakura, she could squint and then also pick out herself—each of them was sitting on one side of a hunted-looking Sasuke, paying little attention to Iruka-sensei’s lesson. They were _so young_. All of them were. Ino’s gaze lingered, perturbed, on their smooth bendy limbs and skinny child bodies, undergrown and so much tinier than she remembered feeling. 

Well. This was… weird. 

Hinata’s head swivelled toward her from amid the closely-packed child-size desks and chairs. Her eyebrows knitted together in either concern or confusion. 

Ino was never quite clear on what the Byakugan could or could not see, even without being activated, and she took off before she could find out the hard way. 

Her last glimpse took in the details of the Hokage monument as best as she could, where—yes. There it was. Four shapes. They blurred as she flew, hard to distinguish when her sight was designed only for moving prey. But there were definitely only four distinct faces up there. No Tsunade, and no Kakashi. 

Ino had seen enough. She released the bird, leaving it to squawk and panic in midair as her mind raced back to her body. 

She opened her own eyes, and for a moment her limbs felt syrupy and strange, too heavy and too bare without their feathers. 

“I’ve got you,” said Sakura, low and steady in her ear. That was Sakura’s warmth leeching into her cool body from behind, and Sakura’s strong arm wrapped around her middle. 

Ino blinked slowly. She hummed her acknowledgement and clasped her hand around Sakura’s forearm, following the wiry musculature down to her wrist and blindly catching her hand. 

“It's a space-time jutsu,” she said. Given that they had ruled out genjutsu, there was only one further conclusion she could draw. “But not for travelling distance. It’s—that is Konoha, but, I think, seven or eight years in the past.”

Sakura’s hand tightened on hers. “ _Seven_ or—” she stopped. There was a moment of silence. Sakura took a deep breath. “...Okay.”

Ino appreciated her effort to stay calm, because she wasn’t feeling super calm herself right then. “I saw my _dad_ ,” she added. “He’s _young_.”

“If it’s seven years, he’s not young,” muttered Sakura.

“Well, he’s not old. He’s not _dead_ ,” Ino added. She waved one hand vehemently. The movement caused her to register what was definitely not just an uncomfortable position on the branch, but actually a bug bite on her naked butt. Konoha was home to multiple species of stinging ant, because... of course it was.

“Ugh, gross. Let me get out of this tree.” Thinking about gross insects and tree-walking was vastly superior to thinking about anything so upsetting as her living father, a concept that made her heart race and her stomach twist.

Climbing down a tree, even using chakra, with no bra on was not an experience Ino wanted to repeat.

Sakura hopped down after her. “Oh, you have a bite.” 

"Where are you looking at, Sakura?" Ino wondered archly.

Sakura flushed. Ino wasn't facing her, but she could _sense_ it.

"It's right there!" she protested.

Ino nearly laughed. "Well, if you're going to be staring anyway, can you get that for me?"

When she looked back, she saw Sakura flush redder around the edges--but she didn't protest.

They both knew Ino was fully capable of healing her own tiny insect bites. She stood still while Sakura did it instead.

She smeared a fingertip of chakra over the raised bite on her skin, immediately erasing the itchy burn of it. 

"Still enjoying the view?" Ino eyed her over her shoulder. "I have to admit, it _is_ pretty nice."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Sakura primly. But she rubbed her thumb over the spot where the bite had been, calluses catching gently on the sensitive skin. “Did you see the seal on the scroll?”

"Not really." Ino had seen all of the scrolls when she’d stolen them, of course, but she’d only been checking for signs of degradation and damage. Even the ones she had partially recognised from her own very spotty understanding of sealing had started to blur together after a while.

Sakura was the better at seals. She had to be, for they were used in all sorts of advanced surgeries and diagnostics. But the only medical seals that dealt with space and time at all were those used in direst emergency, for keeping a patient stable during transportation.

“Do you—?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” Sakura admitted. 

Ino blew out a huge sigh. 

“Why don’t we see about getting supplies first, and then we can look for someone who knows more about sealing,” she suggested. She tugged her shirt down so it covered as much as it possibly could. 

Sakura glanced over at her again. Her eyes lingered on the hem of her shirt, which did not completely cover the lower curve of her buttocks. “And maybe we can get you some pants, too.”

They briefly considered their options, but it was immediately apparent that it would be awfully tricky to infiltrate a hidden village—even one they knew most of the weaknesses of—in person and with virtually no equipment. They would end up alerting somebody for sure. 

But birds were a different matter, in Konoha as well as in other villages, and the Yamanaka clan had been taking advantage of that for years. 

So Ino took a new bird, and then took to the air again and flew over the walls, over the tower and beyond the looming faces of past leaders, until she found a young man taking in the laundry for his civilian family. Slipping one’s consciousness from an animal to a human host was a little more advanced than the basic form of the Mind-Body Transfer, but it was indispensable to infiltrators. Ino landed clumsily on the post of the clothesline, then with careful precision, she left her avian host for her new human one. 

The technique took, of course. After that, all she had to do was package up some of the clean, air-dried clothes and water (and, all right, a little money) with his human hands and then leave them out where a bird might loop her talons right through the twine and carry them off. 

She could hear him cry out after her as she took wing again, but she was long gone before he even got outside to swear at her. A graceful theft, it was not. But it was successful—probably more successful than either of them might have been, had they tied to infiltrate undetected in their own physical bodies… 

As if to remind Ino of Konoha’s security forces and underscore that thought once more, when she flew—with all the aerodynamic grace and poise of a pregnant whale, owing to her purloined goods—back over the walls and the canopies to find where Sakura was holding her body, she saw that she was in conversation with another Konoha-nin. 

She caught a confused impression of flak jacket and casual pose through her avian eyes, and then Ino veered sharply and quietly away, mind racing. She deposited the package in the branches of a tree before gliding back in to watch. 

The landing this time wasn’t good, exactly, but it was quiet. She’d take it. 

Even if she had not been familiar, Sakura would have been recognisable at a glance because of her hair. Ino’s current host, like many birds who ate fruits, liked to be able to pick out vibrant colours from the backdrop of the foliage. 

Sakura was crouched in the branches of a tree, a little lower than Ino. She had at some point stretched the shirt Ino’s insensible body was wearing out, dragging it low enough to warp the fabric and, uh, cover her pubic hair. Nice. 

Unlike the people she was more familiar with, the ninja talking to Sakura took more effort to identify. He was on the ground and standing straight so she could tell he was average in height, with a lazy stance and one hand in his pocket. The cloth to which his hitae-ate was attached was worn bandanna style, with some of his hair sticking out. His weight was back on his hips, and although he was paying attention he was certainly underestimating Sakura. He was awfully sure of himself against a ninja he didn’t recognise. 

“...really not looking to cause any trouble,” Ino heard Sakura saying as she picked her way closer through the foliage, one sharp and quiet little footstep at a time. 

She couldn’t see her face clearly through the leaves, but she knew what the expression on it would be just from the sound of her voice: a fixed, ‘ _I’m trying to be reasonable, but it’s not coming naturally and you aren’t making it easy_ ,’ sort of smile, a twitching little eyebrow. It was adorable when it was because Ino was teasing her! But right now it made her feathers shuffle themselves around, fluffing out angrily. 

The ninja, who must have been part of a patrol of the outer walls, popped a senbon in his mouth and Ino finally recognised the gesture, even though his features were still unclear to her. Genma. The stupid senbon—which had chipped his teeth more than once—were a habit with which he had at some point replaced the even stupider one of smoking. 

“Then you can take your naked friend and leave, shinobi-san,” he drawled.

Pity, Ino thought. Wouldn’t have hurt if he’d failed to notice them as shinobi.

“Sure,” said Sakura sweetly. “I’ll do that just as soon as she can get up.”

“You’ll have to carry her,” Genma corrected. “It’ll keep your hands busy while we escort you back to the outpost.”

The outpost which would, Ino was sure, be one far enough away from the village itself that two poorly armed and clearly unprepared ninja would pose no threat. There would probably be an intel agent waiting for them there, and it would be manned with enough people to keep most ninja from leaving. 

Of course, not much would keep Sakura from leaving a building she didn’t care to be in. She could metabolise sedatives within seconds and knock down walls with one finger. But it wouldn’t be wise to let him take either of them. It was also not necessarily wise to fight him. That left option three, which was to retreat, hopefully without having to engage him in combat. 

Ino hoped to one side. She could get the package, hide it somewhere outside of patrol range of the village, and then follow them overhead until they were in a spot somewhere between the village and the outpost, least proximate to back up… 

It occurred to Ino, a split second before the danger closed upon her, that Sakura should have been easily capable of keeping herself and Ino’s body well hidden from any regular shinobi, and that Genma had very clearly said _we_. 

“Awkkhh!” she squawked, by which she very much meant, _shit!_

Ino released her technique just as a dog’s long, yellowed teeth closed down upon her body, snapping through the neck of the bird she’d been riding in. The horrible crack of bone followed her consciousness into her own body.

“Heh.” said Hana’s familiar voice. “I guess we missed, huh?”

Ino opened her eyes with a shudder. She was held fast again in Sakura’s arms. There wouldn’t be time to savour that pleasant fact, or even to check her ass for further insect bites.

She met the hard eyes of the special jounin standing at a carefully calculated distance from the foot of their tree. 

“Look at that. A miraculous recovery,” he said. He did not sound terribly surprised.

Behind him, Hana’s shorter figure, stocky and steady and surrounded by hip-high dogs like short walls of breathing fur and muscle, emerged from the cover of the trees. 

One of the three Haimaru brothers had a bird dangling from his mouth, limp and unresponsive. _Could have been me_ , said the unhelpful internal voice that always made such points when a ninja would prefer not to consider them. 

The dog dropped it and stepped over the broken little body, baring his bloodied teeth in a snarl. 

“Your face is familiar,” Hana said thoughtfully. She tilted her head, and her sharp dark eyes narrowed. “But you’re not a Konoha ninja.”

Great. That was… just... fantastic. Hana had picked Ino’s clan from the look of her alone—the eyes were always a bit of a give-away. She could only imagine what the report on this would look like when it crossed her fath—crossed Inoichi’s desk. She twitched at the thought. She didn't want to think about Inoichi right now/

Ino’s fingers, hidden in the warm curve between their two bodies, asked a hidden question of Sakura with rapid little taps. She received a response likewise, tapped through her shirt onto the curve of her spine well out of sight of Genma and Hana. 

“I’m sure they’ll have an explanation for that at the outpost,” Genma said, eyeing them both. His eyes dropped to Ino’s—her legs. Definitely her legs. She refused to accept the alternative. “They may even have pants,” he added.

Sakura’s body shifted next to her, just enough that somebody touching her could tell. Ino looked sideways at her and saw her mouth pressed into a grim slash in her face, her eyes shadowed.

A vein was evident in Sakura's forehead, which was never a great sign.

 _At least they’re underestimating us_ , Ino thought. That would make this an awful lot easier. She tapped a last signal to Sakura.

“ _Go!_ ” cried Sakura loudly, “I’ll hold them off!”

If Ino had not been expecting it, she would have been startled by its abruptness—but she had, and she wasn’t. She sprang from the branch and flung herself into the forest, with the echo of Sakura’s voice still ringing in the air around her. 

Hana swore. Dogs growled. Ino heard her coming, stealth forgotten in the rush of the chase and the drive to bare teeth and pursue. 

Even as Ino hurtled through the branches, cushioning her own bare feet with chakra, she heard them closing. A branch went _thunk_ with the weight of a footstep. 

“ _No you **don’t**!_” Sakura bellowed, loud and fierce, and there was an almighty crunch and the sudden scream of tortured rock. 

The whole forest seemed to shake from the earth up: the trees heaved, their branches swayed. Birds shrieked as they took to the sky and fled in a flapping, squawking cloud. 

Behind, Hana yelped and crashed through the branches. Ino, who had been perpared for something of the sort, almost didn’t keep he own balance, either. But she managed, by the skin of her teeth, to cling with her chakra despite the sudden wild shaking of the trees.

She didn’t look back, but she could sense Sakura’s chakra closing at a tremendous speed. She kicked the only dog who had managed to keep up right across his muzzle, and then shot off into the dense foliage to put some distance between herself and the combatants. 

Behind her, timber cracked and creaked. Leaves fluttered past. Ino clenched her teeth and braced for the crash of a whole tree being felled, slamming into the ground hard enough to vibrate the trunks of the trees she was speeding through.

Although it was not necessarily the way either of them would prefer to treat their fellow Leaf ninja, in the end it was easy enough. Genma and Hana, the patrolling pair, had grievously underestimated them—the pantslessness had probably helped with that—and tried to take them on half-cocked, relying on their sheer strength and talents instead of making a solid plan. 

Sakura then rapidly forced both ninja to turn around and address her as the primary threat, leaving Ino free to ‘escape’, a word which in this case meant that she circled around, picking her way around the altercation in a carefully monitored perimeter, extending her chakra sense until she finally caught the dog—who Hana had, inevitably, sent back to the village for help the moment the two of them realised they were in trouble facing Sakura's monstrous strength on their own. 

Once that job was done, she crept closer to the sounds of fighting and dropped a genjutsu—which she had by then, of course, had all the time in the world to prepare—over the remaining combatants. 

One thing you could say for medical training was that it massively improved a ninja’s chakra control. The genjutsu swept over them like an invisible veil. Genma was the best of them at illusory techniques, but he had only been a little better than Ino some eight years into the future. 

The fist flicker of suspicion crossed his face when one of the dogs sagged on his paws, then yawned hugely and rolled bonelessly onto the dirt. But by the time he might have done something about it, he, too, had dropped to the ground, sleeping deeply. 

“Ah…” Sakura’s precise taijutsu form disintegrated when the tension left her. She propped one hand on her hip and toed one of Genma’s feet curiously. It rolled on its ankle, loose, no tension. She nodded in satisfaction.

Ino dropped down from a nearby tree. She grunted with the impact. Chakra was cushioning her feet, but they were still bare. Shoes would have been nice. The ground underfoot was slick, water puddling on top of the hard-packed earth. In some places it had been churned into mud by the fighting. Her toes squelched.

She unslung the dog who had been sent for help from over her shoulders and gratefully set him down next to Hana. 

Sakura’s hair was out of place and her breath was slowly recovering, shoulders moving up and down with the rise and fall of her chest. A fight in which one combatant was trying not to cause harm, but the others had no such restrictions, was exceptionally hard work. 

Ino looked around. The ground was cracked. A tree or two had been felled, one snapped through in a way that seemed to indicate something (or someone) reasonably heavy had been thrown right through its thick trunk. Several more had ended up half drowned, sunk in swampy mud from Genma’s attacks, which had also rendered the rest of the forest floor sort of gross. It smelled like crushed grass, fresh earth, wood chips and old iron—and, faintly, of wet dog.

“This is going to be a hell of a report,” Sakura muttered, following her gaze. 

Ino still wasn't thinking about who might be receiving that report. She didn't know how to feel.

So instead she whined: "Mou...! My hair is such a mess," and started to pick the bits of tree out of it. “And we should get going. And I still don’t have pants!” she added. She’d deposited them in a tree to the west, but her feet ached—and her boobs ached, from racing around without the help of a bra—and it seemed like a terribly long way away.

Sakura sighed. “Let’s get going then. Can you use your chakra to deaden the nerves from their noses?” 

So saying, she crouched down to touch two glowing fingers to one of the dogs’ noses. 

“Yes.” Ino frowned, discarding the debris from the trees that she'd managed to comb free of her hair. Of course she could. The dog's whole face would probably be numb when he came to, but what did that signify to Ino? 

After a moment, she went and did the same thing to Hana. The dogs weren’t the only creatures who could track them. 

She peered down at her, then. “Ne… Sakura…” 

“Mm?”

“…Do you think her shoes are my size?”

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, if you like something about this and feel like commenting, feel free to let me know.


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